This weekend the traditional Memorial Day annual meeting of the National Cartoonists Society will be held in Pittsburgh, PA. Although Saturday’s Reuben Awards banquet is a private affair, the rest of the weekend has been turned into a public comics festival, starting today with the FIRST EVER art show of Reuben Award winners at the Toonseum. The Pittsburgh Comic Arts Festival (which no one is calling PCAF) takes place Sunday with a block turned into a comics fair:

The 900 Block of Liberty Avenue downtown will become a veritable living funny pages block party with visits from Betty Boop, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Dennis the Menace, and the Care Bears. Fun vendors, art activities, chalk artists and caricaturists and will round out the festivities and help to literally draw a crowd!

Inside the Bricolage theater is a full day of discussions and signings. There’s also an exhibition of original art from Fat Albert at the August Wilson Gallery. More in this link and in this preview. While many events are free, there is a $5 charge for panels.

This is one of the best ideas ever, and a big boost for Pittsburgh’s growing comic arts scene. The NCS meeting moves around every year, but it has never been turned into a public festival of this kind. Comic strip cartoonists have traditionally been much shyer than comic book artists—partly because of their higher status in the culture until recently—but with the social media making everyone more approachable, this is a great way to celebrate comic strips and the people who make them.

Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.

1) The Reuben is one award, for outstanding cartoonist of the year. Since the rules now only allow one to win it once, it’s a bit of a de facto lifetime achievement award. But NCS has that too, The Caniff.

Everything else are divisional winners.

2) The most prestigious award comics have? Probably the Pulitzer for Editorial Cartoon (which have been won by comic strips three times). $10,000

And then there is le Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême.

3) Comics fans (that is, comic BOOK fans) don’t follow comic strips for a variety of reasons:
a) different media. Newspapers vs newsstands/shops
b) Senate hearings, when the NCS (via Walt Kelly) distanced themselves from comic book publishers.
c) Different marketing. Comic strips were routinely collected and sold via bookstores, frequently making the New York Times bestseller lists (since at least 1951). Comic books/graphic novels were a sideline up until the late 1990s.
d) Comic strips are mostly gag-a-day, or soap operatic. Comic book fans generally read the superhero genre, which is rarely seen in newspaper comics.

These distinctions are changing, due to web comics, the Internet, and the growing general acceptance of comic books and graphic novels, as well a broadening of genres and stories told.